The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for more cat. She’s reached the “follow me into the bathroom when I go downstairs at night for a wee” stage, but still won’t come upstairs - which means I have to leave her alone for long periods while I work, which makes me feel bad. Before I unsuccessfully arrange yet more treats on the stairs, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

“The eagerness to grave dance on unpopular games has become a bad habit” writes Tyler Wilde for PC Gamer.

That jubilation over Concord's low turnout—it apparently cracked the top 50 best sellers on the PS Store over the weekend—derives to some degree from an I-told-you-so sense of justice: the idea that out-of-touch, creatively bankrupt executives are cynically chasing trends, and that the rest of us would've had the common sense to avoid releasing a Concord, a Marvel's Avengers, a Suicide Squad, a Gotham Knights, or that perplexing Gollum game. But it's not actually that easy to know why one game succeeds and another doesn't.

The devs at Firewalk Studios, many of whom are ex-Bungie, have made a game in the genre they have experience in and released it without the free-to-play monetization we so often complain about, which isn't a cynical or underhanded thing to do. But concurrency numbers have, in some situations, acquired a moral quality: If you release an unpopular game, everyone is suddenly morally justified to shame and embarrass you, whether it's because all big budget games are bad, or live service games are bad, or you did too much woke—pick one.

Madeline Blondeau wrote about “How The Sega Genesis Made Weird Work” for Paste. You have an Altered Beast header, I click.

Of course, Sega wasn’t the only restaurant with red sauce. Third-party developers would push the boundaries of acceptable carnage through the early ‘90s. Namco, for example, was able to resuscitate its grim 1988 brawler, Splatterhouse, into a pair of ambitious and frequently disgusting titles. While the initial follow-up, Splatterhouse 2, was a polished re-do of the first game, the third entry pushed the boundaries of both its genre and its platform. This was not only due to the content, which is arguably the most extreme in the series, but also in its non-linear progression and four branching endings. These endings were exceedingly dark and featured the player’s death, spousal loss, and infanticide—far from a triumphant victory. While not the cited reason for controversy that would go to define the Genesis, gruesome titles like the Splatterhouse games nevertheless had a home on the platform and moved the needle in terms of what was possible to depict in electronic entertainment.

Valued RPS reader #4478 highlighted this IGN piece in the comments last week. “A Prominent Accessibility Advocate Worked With Studios and Inspired Change. But She Never Actually Existed,” writes Grant Stoner.

Banks’ death marked a significant loss for the video game accessibility community. She regularly interacted with developers from studios like Ubisoft and The Coalition, pushing for better options and designs. She helped to revolutionize games journalism through the creation of Can I Play That, a site dedicated to the coverage of accessibility and the disabled perspective. An award was even named after her posthumously, to be given to disabled individuals in games that uplift their communities and educate others on the importance of accessibility.

However, in the years since Banks’ alleged death, mounting evidence and accounts from those close to her work suggest that she was not the person she claimed to be. In fact, some are convinced that Banks may never have existed at all.

Here’s a largely useless but commendable haunted banana prank. I haven’t read this study on lucid dreaming and virtual avatars but it looks interesting because it has some interesting words in the title. Here’s a unscientific but fun video about the cultural perception of Goblins. Here’s an older Rhystic Studies video about Magic’s Chaos Orb video I missed when it came out - great anecdote near the start. Music this week is Lights From The Gate by Mountain Realm, preferably while playing one of Grey Gnome Games’s nifty dungeons-in-a-tin. Have a great weekend!